Stephenson and Bewkes swung for the fences, saying their union would not just take on cable companies but also break up the Google-Facebook digital advertising duopoly.

“We waited year after year . . . ,” said Bewkes, referring to the cable companies and their reluctance to broadly roll out TV Everywhere — an initiative that makes pay-TV channels available on the internet.

“They didn’t have the skill or the scale to do the interfaces,” said Bewkes, adding that cable distributors didn’t want to fork over the investments necessary to make it happen.

Bewkes also unloaded on programmers who waited for carriage renewal talks to sell their online rights.

Despite the Stephenson-Bewkes offensive, there are still plenty of folks opposed to the deal.

“This is a heavily leveraged deal,” Todd O’Boyle, program director at media and democracy group Common Cause, told The Post.

“Consumers will be footing the bill for this,” he said. “That’s a major concern of the public interest — higher rates.”